The Underground Girls of Kabul (18 page)

She enjoyed feeling less monitored; there was no need to watch how she dressed or spoke at all times. It was relaxing not to be defined by her body. While there was moderate progress for urban women during “the Russian time,” girls still needed to closely watch their behavior and dress in public, as social codes remained the same.

Above all, masquerading as a boy gave Azita
access
. She could approach any situation or group of men or boys without being scrutinized or considering how to behave appropriately. Her clothing, her very being, was never a hindrance. It seemed as though she was a more natural fit everywhere in society, and she was always welcome. She felt special, and she didn’t need to avoid anyone. Women and girls would shy away on the street, giving way to her. It was a magical high.

She once observed a boy her own age, about thirteen, lurking around the store and then suddenly tucking a biscuit under his shirt. As the male guardian of the store, Azita reacted instinctively—launching herself at him, grabbing him by the arm, and pulling him out of the store, onto the street outside. With a firm grip still around his arm, she punched him in the stomach. The boy folded and sunk to his knees. Out of the corner of her eye, Azita saw another group of boys running toward her, and knew she must quickly retreat. She leaned in and whispered to the boy: “I am a girl. But I think I’m stronger than you are. And I will beat you even more when you come back.” Then she let go of her grip and ran back into the store, feeling a rush she would never forget. She saw the boy a few times after that, always on his bicycle, but he never attempted to come into the store again.

Her stint on the other side came to an end when her father dismissed her early one afternoon when she was almost fourteen. Azita had begun to grow quickly; she was up two sizes in clothing in just a matter of months, and the day came when she complained of stomach pains. Too afraid to ask her mother, she learned the next day from a classmate what had happened. Neither of her parents said anything, but it was apparent that they knew of the event that had turned her into a woman of childbearing age. Her father made it clear that she would no longer work at the store and that it was not a good idea for her to run around outside anymore, either.

Azita protested her father’s decision, but it was firm. To encourage his daughter to think positively about womanhood, he brought
home a full-length bright blue dress for her. Azita remembers it as a “beautiful, expensive and pretty kind of fairy-tale dress.” She hated it. At first, she struggled to walk in it. She fell twice when the heavy fabric snarled in her long legs, but she soon learned to take shorter strides. She wasn’t walking very far anyway, since she was now mostly confined to the house in the afternoons, like other proper Afghan girls. The improvised volleyball tournament she had set up with a few friends went on without her. She would watch the other children play from her window in the evenings. She would not wear her baseball cap again, or her jeans.

“Do
YOU EVER
wish you had been born a boy?” I ask, as we sit in a corner on the floor, with the silence of a thick Kabul night outside only occasionally interrupted by distant bursts of gunfire.

“Never. It’s the men who create all our conflicts here.”

But she is sure of this: It certainly did her no harm to spend some time as one among them. The way she sees it, her boy years have helped her all her life: They made her more energetic. They made her strong. For almost five years, she could sit and talk to men openly. “I was not afraid of them,” she says. And she never feared them much after that. Those short years are some of the best she can remember. “I have had their experience, too, so I am never embarrassed to speak to men. Now no men will ignore my power. Nobody will ignore my talent.”

“Are you saying this is an experience for Mehran that you want her to have?”

“Yes. An experience.”

“Or is it more of an experiment?”

Her eyes dart back and forth a few times, and she nods, slowly.

“I don’t disagree with you. I will prepare my daughter very carefully for turning back to a girl. I was a boy part-time, and she is a boy full-time. It’s different. I know.”

Her voice fades slightly.

“Is it necessary to do this or not? I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you. We have tried it now for more than a year, and the gossip has stopped. Most people believe I have a son. So now, at least for me, it has become better. I am giving my youngest a taste of the whole life, you know? I have seen her change. She is much more active now, much more alive. She is not afraid of anything. And my guests now respect my family and my husband.”

“So what do you know that other Afghan women do not?”

That’s an easy one. “Most of my voters are men. Society is dominated by men. All the leaders are men. And I have to talk and communicate with them. Of course, I talk to women, too, at gatherings and in families. But all the decisions are still in the hands of men. Of the elders. With the male
shura
councils, in the villages. So I have to talk more to them. Even when I want to talk to women, I have to go through the men to get their permission. And I know their language; I know how to approach them and how to get them to listen to me. Even when I make speeches to voters, I know I have to speak the men’s language even when I talk about women, so they will tell their wives to vote for me.”

The language of men, she says, is calm, direct, and uncompromising. Not too many words, never too much of an explanation. Whatever she says needs to exude authority and ideally lack emotion. Female communication, on the other hand, is all nuance and detail. To men, that can be confusing, she has found.

“What if Mehran came to you tomorrow and said she wanted to be a girl?”

Azita looks up to the ceiling in a silent inshallah: Whatever God wants.

“I would not force her. We asked her if she wanted to be a boy, and she said ‘Wow, let’s go.’ But if she said, ‘I would like to be a girl again,’ I would accept it.”

To Azita,
bacha posh
is less about a preference for sons and more a symptom of how poorly her society works. But, as in politics, she works with the reality she’s been dealt. And sometimes, she argues,
you have to think of temporary solutions while you try to slowly change something bigger. She resents the fact that boys are the preferred children here. But she has a long way to go before she can make the argument in a convincing way that girls are of equal value in Afghanistan. She believes her decision for Mehran, at its core, is also deeply subversive, since it will make her daughter into another kind of woman one day—one who can push society even further. It seems a slightly idealized version of reality, but her best argument lies in her own journey from Badghis back to Kabul.

Azita is fully aware that others may disagree with her mothering choices. At the same time she is defiant: “Yes, this is not normal for you. And I know it’s very hard for you to believe why one mother is doing these things to her youngest daughter. But I want to say to you, some things are happening in Afghanistan that really are not imaginable for you as a Western people.”

O
N THE OTHER
side of town, in a more upscale neighborhood, a regal-looking woman in an emerald-green Punjabi-style dress, her arms heavy with gold bangles, fully agrees. Being a
bacha posh
should not be seen as anything other than a useful and character-strengthening education.

Sakina has done the
hajj
—the pilgrimage to Mecca—and proudly describes her journey as her daughters bring in glass plates of ripe, sugary melon and apple slices. Dark red curtains with heavy tassels give everything a pink glow as we sit on lush carpets, leaning back against brocade cushions lining the walls. Sakina is the daughter of a Pashtun general from one of the eastern provinces, and she has no regrets about growing up as the son her family called Najibullah.

Sakina insists that many Afghan parents know
bacha posh
as good life training for daughters, as well as having magical benefits. It was the capacity she served in: Her own father took a wife who birthed only girls. He took another one, but the unfortunate streak of girls continued. A neighbor saw the family’s dilemma and recommended that Sakina’s mother, who was wife number two and pregnant with Sakina, present the child as a son the day she was born. The good luck arrived—a little brother was indeed born as the family’s next child.

Still, her parents kept Sakina as Najibullah for many years.

Her father, the general, taught her how to shoot a gun and how
to ride a horse—to him, there was nothing young Najibullah was too weak, or too fragile, to master.

The change came at a big party at the family estate on her twelfth birthday. The occasion was not celebrated for her birthday, but for her becoming a woman. She had not yet menstruated, but her parents wanted to make sure she changed back well in time for the onset of puberty. All their relatives had been invited. Food and bakery-made biscuits were brought out to a garden table crowned with a big pastel-colored cake. It was a day of eating and celebration: A lamb was slaughtered and burned in sacrifice, and there was dancing. Sakina’s ankle bracelet, just like the one her younger brother wore, was taken from her and a dress was prepared. She was dispatched to her mother’s quarters for the transition and stepped out in the yellow dress before the guests. She was prompted to parade around so everyone could get a good look at her. They applauded and congratulated her.

“Were you happy to become a woman?”

Sakina, now in her forties, ponders it for a moment. She was not
un
happy. The right word might be
confused
.

“I felt all right. It was my parents’ decision. I did not go outside anymore when I became a girl.
That
was the thing I was sad about. I stayed inside. By sixteen, I was married, so it was only three years that I really was a girl before I became a wife.”

She laughs at the experience. “I was not an expert on the women’s things, like cooking and cleaning. But I was taught by my husband’s family.”

Her father did not adapt as quickly. “I was his son; that’s how he’s always seen me. I am still the boy to him.” They still discuss politics and warfare, and Sakina even weighs in on money and finances; they are, she says, the kind of conversations that she will rarely have with her husband and never with her mother. Sakina has no lingering thoughts about difficulties in becoming a woman; it’s not like she had a choice. She has excelled at motherhood, she points out, with her seven children, both boys and girls. Her husband does lucrative business with the Americans, so the family leads a comfortable life.
Sakina repeats that she considers herself lucky, as she nods to her four daughters peeking through the doorway.

A
SASSY RUNWAY
parade of color and clothing dripping with rhinestones and sequins fills the room. The girls’ wide pants and long sheer tunics range from purple to red to lavender, and there is the sound of tinkling as they move around. These outfits are strictly for at-home use. Their eyes are lined with kohl to enhance perfectly chiseled features, with straight noses, impossibly long eyelashes, and sharp, elegant cheekbones. Sakina’s family lived as refugees in Pakistan for several years under the Taliban rule in Afghanistan, and the girls picked up some beauty tricks there. They are well aware that their looks are a bargaining tool when it comes time for their parents to negotiate good husbands for them. The girls seem excited; foreign visitors are few and far between, and almost always for their father. Almost in a chorus, they invite Setareh and me to stay for their afternoon tea party, with its teen agenda: gossip and beautification.

A girl with large earrings and bushy eyebrows takes my nonwriting left hand and places it on her knee. With a slim paintbrush dipped in henna, she outlines delicate flowering loops along each finger, quickly growing on my hand, up, onto my forearm. The girls are around the same age as Zahra, but while she prefers to discuss martial arts movies and wrestling matches, the topics here are very different.

Setareh and I soon realize that the only interviewing taking place is directed at us. When a few neighbor girls also drop in to join the party, they total eight. They all lob questions at me:

How old am I? Over thirty, indeed? What cream do I use on my face? How many children do I have? Really—none? They offer condolences and smack their lips over my bad luck. My husband’s family must be very upset—I am married, of course? No? Again, they offer their regrets: a great shame that nobody wanted me. They understand—it is known to happen to some girls. Usually the very ugly or poor ones. Their concern extends to my parents: They must
be unhappy, ashamed even, to have an old, unmarried daughter. And the relatives, horribly embarrassed, certainly?

By now, I try to insist it may not be a complete disaster to be unmarried, but Setareh feels the need to intervene and freestyle the translation a little. She explains to the girls that, in her personal view, it is indeed a little tragic for my family. That concession renders sympathetic faces all around.

When Sakina steps out of the room, questions become juicier: In the West, do I walk around almost naked in the streets? And have I “had relations” with
a thousand men
? Their Koran teacher has discreetly let it be known that every Western woman easily reaches that number. Setareh, too, looks relieved when I deny it being true with some emphasis.

Just as I am warming to their prompts for an actual number, a young, skinny James Dean in low-slung jeans and a short-sleeved shirt walks in, flashing a smile at us before slumping down into a corner. It is Sakina’s youngest daughter, with the slouch and hip bones of an aspiring rock star. She is fourteen, and almost identical to her older sister, who also lived as a boy until a few years ago. She has pleaded with her parents to let her stay a boy for a little longer. There are sons in the family, but their mother wants to instill some strength in the girls by raising them as boys at first. That is the official reason. A little magical luck for the son making did not hurt either, a proud Sakina has let slip.